Choosing a Writing Assignment/Long Writing Assignments

Long writing assignments should be the main focus of a course’s assessment, given that they will take students a long time to complete. Examples include lab reports in the format of journal articles, and ≥ 1,000-word essays that require students to integrate relevant sources from the literature and/or argue a position based on sound reasoning. Long writing assignments can be scaffolded (broken into a series of related assignments) to help students dedicate the necessary time to produce a polished final product, which they may not do if they are left to produce one big piece of writing without guiding steps along the way.

Strengths

• Students gain practice in discipline-specific writing that closely resembles professional academic writing (e.g. scientific journal articles that are written after scientists conduct research).

• Students must construct and order logical arguments, learning about their writing process as well as developing content knowledge associated with their courses and specialist disciplines.

• Students can enhance their confidence in writing about their discipline due to the greater focus – and time spent – on writing long essays and lab reports.

Challenges

• Marking/grading can take a lot of time, especially when you need to focus on grammar/technical English. However, you can reduce marking time by adapting your assessment style. For example, a holistic rubric will help you to focus on the quality of the whole assignment¹, rather than individual writing components, and allow you to provide just two or three feedback comments per paper.

• Providing appropriate assignment scaffolding requires time, which creates a trade-off between focusing on developing writing skills and on delivering detailed course content.

• Teaching students how to search, read and interpret the scientific literature can take a lot of time, because many students will lack the required skills, not having had to use them much before.